Monist Metaphysics

Guest

I've seen it described that monism acts to level humanity, that it is a function of the Judeo-Christian egalitarian ethic, and that it is an oversimplification.

It may be.

While I've not had a chance to read all the materials on this site, I will propose an argument in favor of a monist ontology in order to discern the quality of thought coming from some of these members. Understandably, you will be engaged in a similar process of evaluation in the inverse.

------

The term universe may seem problematic. Our ability to conceptualize the unity of precepts in the term outpaces our perceptual ability. How can we include an apparently boundless existence within a single signifier? Reference is a game of language, and never truly reflects the "objective" referent, but if we engage in this game on it's own terms it can be used to produce a process of investigation in another which may lead to their uncovering of that elusive referent.

In the case of the universe we create a set which is defined to include all objects with the property of being. It depends upon the other's definition of the term "being" whether such a set will truly be "universal".

We are now in the process of building mutual definitions: I'm an individual-object, I have being, all my thoughts have being, thus I cannot conceptualize of non-being objects. Being is the quality of every conceivable reality, inconceivable realities cannot be discussed. Discussion of an entity therefore entails the existence of the entity. The word unicorn exists thus the referent exists, even if only in thought. Unicorns are thought objects, and have an existence as such. The universe exists, likewise, as a thought object, the question is whether such a category exists outside of our description.

This is the world of description, all ontologies are descriptions, so within an ontology we can discuss the universe without semantic difficulty. The set of all sets is an intelligible concept and so constitutes a thought referent. The universe has thus been given a being.
The question of the nature of that being will determine whether the thought object "universe" is similar in character to the commonly conceived objective referent of the term.

If we, for instance, due to our conceptual limitations, miss some component of reality in our definition of being, then the concept of the universe as ALL, will not be replicated in our thought object. Yet, if we include in our definition of being all of reality, then we include not only all conceivable reality but also all inconceivable. Being is thus described as the foundational quality of all reality. All processes have existence, all objects have existence, all information has existence. All pasts and futures have existence, ALL has existence.

The existence of ALL begs a question, "what about that which falls outside of all?". This is similar to the question, "Why being rather than nothing?". That which falls outside of all, is nothing, is not. If it is, then it exists and is therefore part of all. "Why being?" - in order to be uttered, requires being. Being is the requisite quality underpinning of all investigation. So what about a non-investigatory, non-being, entity, what about NOTHING? Nothing does not exist, thus it is nothing. Including all of being within a perspective negates nothing.

Nothing exists only as a "not here". Nothing exists relative to a frame of reference, but would be more adequately be labeled inaccessibility. We, as reference frames, cannot discern inaccessibility from nothing, so we conflate the two. If we were not perspectival entities then we would have never have developed the term nothing (we would have developed no term, for all terms imply the relation of reference to referent as separate). We are a frame of reference with a limited interaction, limited perspective, so the term nothing is introduced as a reference to inaccessibility.

Time is dimensionality, dimensionality is a property of perspective. Without a frame of reference there is no distance or time. Our perception of an "expanding universe" relies on an "objective" time, but time is a measure of our subjective relation to other being entities. Our consciousness operates in one direction, but to ascribe that forward movement onto reality itself is to confuse epistemology with ontology. The B theory of time has gained dominance since Einstein described Relativity, I won't waste time repeating here what would be better covered by a simple wikipedia search.

Redirecting our search downward into the very smallest we're confronted by the nature of complexity. The smaller an object, the less complex, as larger objects are composed of the smaller and retain the fullness of their complexity. As we continue this process we reach a point where complexity is found to reduce to a minimum, or else complexity is infinite.

If complexity is infinite, then all information is contained in every point - reality is holographically self-identical.
If there is a minimum of complexity then that minimally complex unit must be the most basic constituent of every object.

Either situation reveals monism.

To allow for interpretation and discussion I'll cut it off here. Satyr, I want to hear from you.

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Tue Jan 15, 2013 7:50 pm

Thales wrote:: I've seen it described that monism acts to level humanity, that it is a function of the Judeo-Christian egalitarian ethic, and that it is an oversimplification.

It may be.

While I've not had a chance to read all the materials on this site, I will propose an argument in favor of a monist ontology in order to discern the quality of thought coming from some of these members. Understandably, you will be engaged in a similar process of evaluation in the inverse.

Are you the dude from the YouTube Channel (Eric Orwoll)?
Just curious.

------

Thales wrote:: The term universe may seem problematic. Our ability to conceptualize the unity of precepts in the term outpaces our perceptual ability. How can we include an apparently boundless existence within a single signifier?

And one which is changing as we describe it.
The description loses some relevance the moment it is over. But change does not occur fast enough to make all conceptions and categories useless...fortunately.
On a human timescale it is possible to construct or to find patterns which we can then call laws of nature.
I am not convinced that these laws can hold true for eternity, as entropy means fragmentation or a decline towards a near-absolute state of randomness (chaos)...a near-infinite space-time continuum...which never completes itself.
This too is a method of conceptualizing the inconceivable.

Thales wrote:: Reference is a game of language, and never truly reflects the "objective" referent, but if we engage in this game on it's own terms it can be used to produce a process of investigation in another which may lead to their uncovering of that elusive referent.

In this case the "referent" is made into an object, from the vantage point outside of it, by a mind which is forever within it.

This is what I've called Top<>Down thinking.
We begin with a given, in this case a presumed whole, with no reference to anything in experience, and then we attempt to justify it by seeking in the experience a reason to.
This is what religions do.

Though there is no whole, no immutable thing, in existence, the very term being a description of what is non-existent, the whole is presented as the exception.
To achieve our goal we must negate the sensually perceived and project a mental construct which contradicts the experienced.
Though we find no evidence of an end or a whole, we insist on it, because we cannot conceptualize anything without reducing it to a thingness.

It is this reduction taken literally, which explains Modernity and its leveling reasoning.
It reduces the inconceivable to a thing, giving it value and a symbol. This is how Modernity eliminates spirituality, turning all into a numerical value.

Thales wrote:: In the case of the universe we create a set which is defined to include all objects with the property of being. It depends upon the other's definition of the term "being" whether such a set will truly be "universal".

Being is another allusion to that which is nowhere in evidence.
A linguistic mistake, if taken literally and not figuratively.
Due to the lack of a better term let us use Heidegger's Becoming as a more precise alternative.

To exist is to be active, to be dynamic, to be in Flux...to change.
All these words are attempts to describe, metaphorically, artistically, what is not static.

Thales wrote:: We are now in the process of building mutual definitions: I'm an individual-object, I have being, all my thoughts have being, thus I cannot conceptualize of non-being objects.

I don't know what you are, but I am a Becoming, finding identity, self, in memory: encoded past.
To know self, is to know my past; to understand self is to understand my past; to appreciate self is to accept the past; to honor self is to pay homage to the past; to be strong and smart is to be informed by the past.
Self is the manifestation of the past.

An object is what I call an object/objective or an Idea(l).
These are simplifications/generalizations of sensual stimuli, incorporated into mental models (abstractions/thoughts).
These models I use to orient myself within a fluid world. I project them, and then direct myself accordingly.

These models are constructed through trial and error methods (evolved methods) based on a binary of on/off, which then become I/Other, 1/0, friend/foe, good/bad...and the entire human conceptual code.
These evolved methods are then called a priori, as they are a starting proposition without which no conceptualizing can begin.
I think of them as a noetic grid into which abstractions are placed...and within which movement can be tracked, by juxtaposing one mental model with the next...in a stream of thought we call consciousness.

Thales wrote:: Being is the quality of every conceivable reality, inconceivable realities cannot be discussed.

No, being is the conception itself.
Being is the phenomenon, perceived via sensual stimuli and abstracted, which exhibits patterns, no the level of the sensual organ being used, which make it perceptible.
It is the phenomenon stripped of all its dimensions except the ones which the brain can process and include into a mental model.
This is what I call simplification/generalization.

What the brain cannot make sense of or cannot find a pattern in or cannot perceive due to the quality of the sense organ involved, it interprets as darkness or chaos.

For me existence is dynamic...active...constant (inter)activity.
That which exists is active, that which is not active does not exist.

Thales wrote:: Discussion of an entity therefore entails the existence of the entity. The word unicorn exists thus the referent exists, even if only in thought. Unicorns are thought objects, and have an existence as such. The universe exists, likewise, as a thought object, the question is whether such a category exists outside of our description.

Because the world is experienced in the brain, using mental abstractions, these can also be constructed by using sensual data which have no combined reference in the world.
For instance, in the example of a unicorn, the mind already has a working model of a horse and of a horned animal, which it then combines in a way that refers to nothing outside the brain.

But so are all things so constructed and so the quality of a mental model, an abstraction, is only as good as the referents it has to the ongoing world in Flux. this is why thinking is not final and complete and whole but must be continuously upgraded, and tested.
Consciousness like everything else is also a process, not a thing.

The degree of referents outside the brain an abstraction has determines its quality.
An abstraction with few reference point to the ongoing world of flux is called Fantasy.

We see here why although imagination is part of what we call intelligence fantasy is a warping of imagination, which might lead to delusion.

Thales wrote:: This is the world of description, all ontologies are descriptions, so within an ontology we can discuss the universe without semantic difficulty.

Language, being a reflection of mental abstractions is always figurative, symbolic, metaphorical, allegorical.
Language is an art-form trying to capture the Flux, the dynamism of reality, if it is concerned with remaining true to what is perceived, using indirect emthods.
Like a photograph is but a representation of what it depicts, so too is language a representation.

When the word is confused for the thing itself, we get the delusion of thingness, or of God, or of nihilism.
Nihilism is the preference of the linguistic image, the mental abstraction to the real, because the abstraction can be altered in accordance to personal tastes and psychological imperatives, to such a point that it actually contradicts the sensually perceived world.

In my view this is a form of narcissism that can result in schizophrenia and solipsism...but that another issue.

Because the mental model is a human construct, an artifice, a tool used, originally, to orient the Will - here we are touching upon metaphysics - it can be molded into any shape desired...ergo the Unicorn.

If we delve into Modernity, for a moment, this preference for the human artifice rather than the real, this desire to ignore the sensual, dismissing it as fake, an illusion, a farce, a mask hiding a deeper reality, is what is being used to construct these social myths concerning equality, the description of sex as a choice, the dismissal of race as superficial, this blatant reversal of everything perceived into everything preferred and imagined and desired.
Here the slow decay of referential between the concept and the real is excused or it is corrected by manipulating the environment to pretend, to morph into the desirable artifice.
This is what Baudrillard talked about as a simulation.
(Simulacrum & Simulation)

It can also be call institutionalization...and this includes science by the way. Pinker exposes the modern myths still infecting science and scientists.
Take this insatiable search for a beginning...the Big band...the absolute point, the God particle.
All projections by a mind infected with absolutist thinking...in the west due to the effects of centuries of Judeo-Christian thinking, and then Secular Humanism (Marxism).

There is no evidence of a beginning and yet they insist on looking for it, placing scientists in a corner when debating their religious counterparts on the origins of the universe and how something can come out of nothing.
The corner is that of accepting the same basic logic.

For example, if I accept 1 as a starting proposition, then 0 follows as its negation. An absolute implies an absolute negation.
This makes the mathematical phrase: 1+1=2 logical because it remains true to its own first premise.
The logic is built into the thinking.
Logic here is the practice of remaining true to the shared presupposition, which is taken as self-evident.

Similarly, when Creationists debate Scientists they debate within the shared first proposition which is taken by both as self-evident...when it has no reference to anything sensual but is simply accepted: beginning/end.
In scientific thinking the logic is built into the language of math: 1/0.
In fact, there is no ONE and so this makes the NIL a nonsensical concept.
Both useful though.

Thales wrote:: The set of all sets is an intelligible concept and so constitutes a thought referent. The universe has thus been given a being.

Therefore, man gives the universe Being.
Man is the Creator.
The concept has no meaning outside the human mind and the context that flow from it.

Thales wrote:: If we, for instance, due to our conceptual limitations, miss some component of reality in our definition of being, then the concept of the universe as ALL, will not be replicated in our thought object. Yet, if we include in our definition of being all of reality, then we include not only all conceivable reality but also all inconceivable. Being is thus described as the foundational quality of all reality. All processes have existence, all objects have existence, all information has existence. All pasts and futures have existence, ALL has existence.

Such a gross simplification no man can ever appreciate.
The very attempt to encompass reality into a whole, placing it within these ambiguous boundaries, is man playing God.

How does all fit into a part of it?
The Top<>Down method begins with a conclusion and works backwards from there.

Thales wrote:: The existence of ALL begs a question, "what about that which falls outside of all?". This is similar to the question, "Why being rather than nothing?". That which falls outside of all, is nothing, is not.

There is no "outside" and so the very concept of all fails.
Nothing and Something fail because they are the opposite ends of the binary code which superposes a THING.

Thales wrote:: If it is, then it exists and is therefore part of all. "Why being?" - in order to be uttered, requires being. Being is the requisite quality underpinning of all investigation. So what about a non-investigatory, non-being, entity, what about NOTHING? Nothing does not exist, thus it is nothing. Including all of being within a perspective negates nothing.

Thing is an abstraction which then leads to the nonsensical dualism of something and nothing.
This is a way of comprehending...a tool.
It is symbolic, not actual.

This is how Modernity reduces reality into thingness, making materialism, the social phenomenon, a blight...turning value into monetary codes.

Consciousness requires a process. A Becoming...not a Being.
Being is static...a Being would be God, and He would not need, so He would not think...even if this He made any sense at all.

Thales wrote:: Nothing exists only as a "not here". Nothing exists relative to a frame of reference, but would be more adequately be labeled inaccessibility. We, as reference frames, cannot discern inaccessibility from nothing, so we conflate the two. If we were not perspectival entities then we would have never have developed the term nothing (we would have developed no term, for all terms imply the relation of reference to referent as separate). We are a frame of reference with a limited interaction, limited perspective, so the term nothing is introduced as a reference to inaccessibility.

As I've said many times before, there are many ways to describe, symbolize, the absolute...because it is absent.
What is not in evidence can be anything we can imagine.

Here and Now are but two more absolutist terms with no reference outside the human brain.

Thales wrote:: Time is dimensionality, dimensionality is a property of perspective. Without a frame of reference there is no distance or time. Our perception of an "expanding universe" relies on an "objective" time, but time is a measure of our subjective relation to other being entities. Our consciousness operates in one direction, but to ascribe that forward movement onto reality itself is to confuse epistemology with ontology. The B theory of time has gained dominance since Einstein described Relativity, I won't waste time repeating here what would be better covered by a simple wikipedia search.

The frame of reference is the observer to the observed. The I to the object/objective or the otherness. The phenomenon...that which appears or is apparent.
This sets up the grid.

Thales wrote:: Redirecting our search downward into the very smallest we're confronted by the nature of complexity. The smaller an object, the less complex, as larger objects are composed of the smaller and retain the fullness of their complexity. As we continue this process we reach a point where complexity is found to reduce to a minimum, or else complexity is infinite.

Complexity is a relationship between the observed and the observer.
The quality of mind determines what patterns it can perceive in the world.

To a simpler mind the simple seems complex.
Pattern recognition is what abstraction is all about.

But given that chaos is increasing this means that order is decreasing...or that patterns are becoming less likely.
This chaos is a way of saying randomness.
Such a state would be imperceptible and incomprehensible to a mind and so it would interpret it as darkness, void.

Thales wrote:: If complexity is infinite, then all information is contained in every point - reality is holographically self-identical.
If there is a minimum of complexity then that minimally complex unit must be the most basic constituent of every object.

You are trying to describe an absolute using fancy words.
A "minimum" of complexity implies a boundary.
Infinity is how the mind conceptualizes all the possible unknowns...space being a projection of possibility.

"Holographically self identical" is a bunch of empty words placed next to each other to look impressive.
Self is a process that is never identical to itself, as it is always diverging.
There is no singular instance of a perfect similarity. Not even clones are similar...not even you are the same on any given instant.
All is process, and so never a self.
Self is a Becoming...a towards, founded on a past.

Thales wrote:: Either situation reveals monism.

In your mind, yes.
You consider Self as self-evident, then add to its the delusion of identical, and presto...a self-referential mental construct.
A Uni-verse in a brain-cell.
How can something be identical when it is never static?
Only when it is simplified/generalized into a thingness.

--------------

I do believe this is the one-hundredth time I've repeated this stuff.

In closing...monism is a reduction, a leveling.
It incorporates all into a singularity, reducing all to an inconsequential accident and a big joke.
This desire to reduce all down to a numerical value...a ONE is what is responsible for modern man's loss of meaning and of identity and of distinction.

The Monad is the desirable absent: It has also been called Particle, God, One, Here, Now.
The absent is what we lack...what he desire, what he sense as Need/Suffering.

_________________
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
μηδέν άγαν

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Tue Jan 15, 2013 7:57 pm

Quote :: If complexity is infinite, then all information is contained in every point - reality is holographically self-identical.

This may account for such things as virtual particles manifesting from "nothing"; vacuum energy. Perhaps every point in the universe has the potential for a big bang.

Or else it may be the result of multiversal interaction. 2 universes, undetectable to each other on a macro-level, but on the string level abutting eachother, grinding against eachother, the friction causing mini big bangs.

Just a thought.

Something is the positing of a definite "thing", a platonic form which by its nature as a precise definition cannot change, since it would then be something else.

Nothing follows from the assertion of something, which it is the negation of. However, one cannot say that nothing "exists" because by definition it has no existential value in any way.

Nothing would not have dimensions, could not move in time, could not interact, would be totally inert. There is no example of this available so it is not demonstrable.

One is forced to conclude that it is an invented ontological concept, probably originating from causality theories which presupposed it without properly examining such a presupposition.

Describing the universe as a set uses language that carries connotations of borders. A set has a definite edge.
For the universe not to be infinite in extent, the nature of this edge would have to be described as well as the nature of what it bordered. As above, nothing is a conceptualization. It refers to nothing real.
What is the nature of the edge of a set that contains within it "all"?

The usual language concerns. For example, if interaction is thought to occur through "things" performing an "act" resulting in an "effect".... what becomes smuggled into the equation is the preconception of an actor/act or cause/effect dichotomy.

_________________
"I do not exhort you to work but to battle; I do not exhort you to peace but to victory. May your work be a battle; may your peace be a victory." -TSZ

Guest

Satyr wrote:: Are you the dude from the YouTube Channel (Eric Orwoll)?
Just curious.

Yes.

Satyr wrote:: And one which is changing as we describe it.
The description loses some relevance the moment it is over. But change does not occur fast enough to make all conceptions and categories useless...fortunately.
On a human timescale it is possible to construct or to find patterns which we can then call laws of nature.
I am not convinced that these laws can hold true for eternity, as entropy means fragmentation or a decline towards a near-absolute state of randomness (chaos)...a near-infinite space-time continuum...which never completes itself.
This too is a method of conceptualizing the inconceivable.

A change implies time. The passage of time can only be measured relative to a frame of reference.
Simultaneity is not a universal phenomenon, the order of events A and B occur with reference to the position and velocity of observer C. From our vantage point the universe seems to proceed forward and to change, but it is not the universe which changes- it is us. Your identity is momentary, no two moments of your history belong to the same reference frame. We perceive our passage through this series of reference frame due to memory. Memory encodes the perception of a past frame into the present frame, and we build our sense of identity based on this. For the sake of convenience we may label our remembered frames as being a part of this identity, but in a strict sense they are not. “You” are defined only by this moment. It is in this moment that we may find that “being” which you deny. Reality is continuum, but your consciousness is not. As you point out, the constituent neurological processes which build your phenomenology are discrete. There is a smallest unit of thought because the processes of mind do not correlate completely with physical matter, mind is epiphenomenal over matter- it is a function of matter. Neurons contain more atoms then they do thoughts at any referentially defined simultaneity. As a result of this discrete nature of the brain, there is a discrete nature of perceived time. Any one moment is indivisible, and it is in these indivisible-eternal moments that your identities are contained.

Entropy is not a universal progression towards randomness. The inflationary big bang models suggest an inflationary force which dissipates matter over the course of a particular big-bang system's history (entropy), but new material systems are constantly brought about within this background inflation. Each big-bang system eventually succumbs to entropy, but the WHOLE system does not change, the TOTAL energy is not dissipated. By the relative magnitudes of the force of gravity and of inflation we are guaranteed to be causally disconnected from other big-bang systems, so all empirically accessible data will suggest a dissipation of energy over space but this ignores the INEVITABLE creation of new singularities - through the mechanism of quantum fluctuation the energy of inflation is converted into the energy of matter. This process is eternal, unending.

Satyr wrote:: In this case the "referent" is made into an object, from the vantage point outside of it, by a mind which is forever within it.

This is what I've called Top<>Down thinking.
We begin with a given, in this case a presumed whole, with no reference to anything in experience, and then we attempt to justify it by seeking in the experience a reason to.
This is what religions do.

Though there is no whole, no immutable thing, in existence, the very term being a description of what is non-existent, the whole is presented as the exception.
To achieve our goal we must negate the sensually perceived and project a mental construct which contradicts the experienced.
Though we find no evidence of an end or a whole, we insist on it, because we cannot conceptualize anything without reducing it to a thingness.

It is this reduction taken literally, which explains Modernity and its leveling reasoning.
It reduces the inconceivable to a thing, giving it value and a symbol. This is how Modernity eliminates spirituality, turning all into a numerical value.

We cannot conceptualize anything without reducing it to a thingness- I agree, which is why I disclaimed that I would be meeting the issue of symbolizing the un-framed/unbounded/unlimited/infinite/universal reality on linguistic grounds. I explicitly brought a focus to the inaccuracy of language do avoid this sort of misinterpretation.
This space of writing, this conceptual space, is where we may begin to assess the likelihood of the universal whole, to claim that I am assuming it would be to ignore the nature of my investigation as an investigation.
You see no evidence for it, but others do. You may start with the assumption that they are wrong, but then you would not be participating in an argument you would be intellectually masturbating.
If I define BEING relative to its linguistic function- the noun which give the verbs “is” and “are” their function, then I may begin to question the nature of those verbs. All words ARE. A word which isn't is not a word. The same goes with all conceivable reality; all reality IS, a reality which isn't is not real. BEING as the noun which gives “is” its isness merits an investigation. If we are going to talk about reality, then we may need to define the term. The way I define it is: all that exists. The only prerequisite for being included in reality, is BEING. There is exactly ONE quality which all conceivable reality shares in common, it all exists.
This investigation is occurring in the realm of language, in order to participate you must meet it on its terms. If you choose different definitions then the ones I'm setting forward, then you are not arguing with me. Definition sets are relative, it is the space of argument, this conceptual space that may bridge the gap of definition.

Satyr wrote:: Being is another allusion to that which is nowhere in evidence.
A linguistic mistake, if taken literally and not figuratively.
Due to the lack of a better term let us use Heidegger's Becoming as a more precise alternative.

To exist is to be active, to be dynamic, to be in Flux...to change.
All these words are attempts to describe, metaphorically, artistically, what is not static.

Being is in evident in the realm of language. Is is. Are is. Being is. This is the realm of language. You can attempt to point to the pre-conceptual, but to do that you must use concepts, just as I do. Now that we're looking at the language we're using, let's consider Becoming. Becoming IS. Becoming, the process, exists. Process, exists. Flux exists. Being is evident in language, to annihilate being you would have to operate in a whole different sort of linguistic construct. Being is fundamental to expression.
Mistakes exist relative to an intention. What is my intention? If you don't know, then how can you label my word a mistake?
If you think you do know, then you are even more foolishly arrogant then I am.

Satyr wrote:: I don't know what you are, but I am a Becoming, finding identity, self, in memory: encoded past.
To know self, is to know my past; to understand self is to understand my past; to appreciate self is to accept the past; to honor self is to pay homage to the past; to be strong and smart is to be informed by the past.
Self is the manifestation of the past.

An object is what I call an object/objective or an Idea(l).
These are simplifications/generalizations of sensual stimuli, incorporated into mental models (abstractions/thoughts).
These models I use to orient myself within a fluid world. I project them, and then direct myself accordingly.

These models are constructed through trial and error methods (evolved methods) based on a binary of on/off, which then become I/Other, 1/0, friend/foe, good/bad...and the entire human conceptual code.
These evolved methods are then called a priori, as they are a starting proposition without which no conceptualizing can begin.
I think of them as a noetic grid into which abstractions are placed...and within which movement can be tracked, by juxtaposing one mental model with the next...in a stream of thought we call consciousness.

Objects are simplifications, but we are operating in a space of linguistic objects. We are operating in a field of simplification. No series of words can capture the reality, the everlasting tao is not the tao which can be named. I agree with you. I know what you are saying. But part of my investigation centers on language, and objects exist in language.
These evolved methods, these logics, are the presuppositional grounds upon which we may begin to understand the perceptual world of another.
I want a live discussion because we cannot resolve the discrepancy of definition in anything other than real time. You say this is more efficient, I say this is stupidity, this is the entrenching of definition sets.

I understand your concept of flux, and it is a valid description of the world of our precepts if we assume our remembered self to be a past self. It relies on a conception of time which is intuitive yet which does not reflect the best science available. Time is a measure of relation between reference frames- moments of consciousness constitute reference frames, thus we can measure between points in time, but we cannot measure an absolute progression of time. Time itself, outside of a reference frame exists undifferentiated- static.
I could respond to the rest of what you've said but it will save both of us time if you respond to this fragment. Better to refine our understanding of the basics than to broadly skate over more of this mutual misinterpretation.

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Wed Jan 16, 2013 9:34 am

Thales wrote:: A change implies time.

Time is a human measurement of change.

Thales wrote:: The passage of time can only be measured relative to a frame of reference.

Change is experienced through the juxtaposition of mental models (abstractions) which then exhibit a divergence.
The difference between abstractions is what we call change. The succession is what we experience as linear time.
The frame of reference is the observer himself, and his systolic/diastolic rates...his metabolic rates, how fast his brain can process data.
Time is the beat of human cellular activity.

Thales wrote:: Simultaneity is not a universal phenomenon, the order of events A and B occur with reference to the position and velocity of observer C. From our vantage point the universe seems to proceed forward and to change, but it is not the universe which changes- it is us.

Big error.
The universe is not separate from us. We are a part of the real experiencing itself, if you will.
We are not other than the world, but a part of ti trying to distinguish itself.
The relationship is antagonistic (agon)...the Apollonian.
We are an ordering in the disordering.

Entropy is increasing and decreasing simultaneously, this is true...but life, consciousness, can only occur in this temporal direction - of increasing entropy - because in the direction of decreasing entropy life is superfluous.
Life is a (re)action to entropy. It is a resistance, a rejection of it...a continuing affirmation.

Thales wrote:: Your identity is momentary, no two moments of your history belong to the same reference frame.

No, an identity is not built and destroyed constantly.
No tabula rasa...Identity is a continuum...a apttern which holds together through memory. Genes are a form fo memory.
Identity, to know self, is to know the past.

Thales wrote:: We perceive our passage through this series of reference frame due to memory. Memory encodes the perception of a past frame into the present frame, and we build our sense of identity based on this. For the sake of convenience we may label our remembered frames as being a part of this identity, but in a strict sense they are not.

You are the sum of your past. To know yourself is to know this.

Thales wrote:: “You” are defined only by this moment.

There is no "moment" as this is another term for the absent absolute; no here, no now.
You are a manifestation of a determining past, projected forward, but referencing the past (shallow or deep) to guide self.
Consciousness is a perpetual 'looking back', as the processing time required to formulate abstractions makes them obsolete the moment they are finalized and incorporated into cohesive larger mental models.
Mind is playing catch-up. To compensate imagination is used.
Imagination finds patterns that may hold true for longer periods of time - value here being a measure of this - which are then projected in a preemptive attemtps to remain as close as possible to the ongoing (inter)activities.
This is the advantage intelligence offers the organism. Intelligence being a part of the processes included in the term "intelligence".

Projection is essential.
The quality of the projection is not equal, as more sophisticated brains make more sophisticated models and can project, accurately, further ahead. This is what genius is: The ability to perceive finer details, incorporate them in more complex mental models and then project them further, succesfully...because they hold true for longer periods of time. Timelessness is a measure of quality.
Stupidity, simplicity, is shallow thinking...a less deep perceptual-event-horizon...as I call it.

Thales wrote:: It is in this moment that we may find that “being” which you deny. Reality is continuum, but your consciousness is not.

Consciuosness is a part of the organisms' brain functions...not something magical.
Consciousness is the sum of all brain processes, controlled and guided by a mental agency which incorporates them all into a single thought.

Consciousness is a part of the world becoming aware of itself; self-consciousness is a part of consciousness becoming aware of itself.
This is why knowledge is never complete.
We can never completely know self first because self is also an ongoing, dynamic process, (inter)acting, but also because the eye cannot see itself, so the part of the brain, the mnid, that overlooks the rest, always excludes itself.
This creates the illusion of otherness....then God....or this separation of mind from body. If it is nurtured and the separation is widened, as many nihilistic memes do, so as to control the mind(s), we get schizophrenia...a disjunction between mind/body, or nature (past) and nurture (immediate shallow past).
This is Nihilism: a rejection of the past ( heritage, race, sex etc.), so as to incorporate the mind in current ideals, identification: modernity.

Thales wrote:: neurons contain more atoms then they do thoughts at any referentially defined simultaneity. As a result of this discrete nature of the brain, there is a discrete nature of perceived time. Any one moment is indivisible, and it is in these indivisible-eternal moments that your identities are contained.

There is no indivisible anything, as thingness is a human tool, a mental artifice.
This is where your Monism finds its roots in Judeo-Christian nihilism.
There is only patters, exhibiting a congruence of predictable (inter)activity, then interpreted as things.
Matter are flows which are slower, in relation to the perceiving brain, and energy are flows which are faster.
Speed here a temporal measurement of change....movement towards or away.

In the question "What is changing, what is flowing" the answer is presupposed, as it asks for a thing....just as 1+1=2 presupposes its own logic as it takes it as self-evident that there is a singularity, a one.
This leads in the linguistic paradoxes:
"There are absolutely no absolutes" and "The truth is there is no truth".

The human brain cannot think outside its methods...unless it becomes flexible, artistic, and attempts to perceive and express reality indirectly...metaphorically, allegorically. Like with the String Theory.

The concept of an indivisible monad is a nihilistic one, as it contradicts experience and negates a dynamic existence - existence=(inter)activity.

It is an expression of dissatisfaction, and anxiety concerning a ceaseless fluidity requiring constant vigilance and adjustment and being characterized by uncertainty.
The monad is the great equalizer, as well. It reduces all to a point and then equates them.

Thales wrote:: Entropy is not a universal progression towards randomness. The inflationary big bang models suggest an inflationary force which dissipates matter over the course of a particular big-bang system's history (entropy), but new material systems are constantly brought about within this background inflation. Each big-bang system eventually succumbs to entropy, but the WHOLE system does not change, the TOTAL energy is not dissipated. By the relative magnitudes of the force of gravity and of inflation we are guaranteed to be causally disconnected from other big-bang systems, so all empirically accessible data will suggest a dissipation of energy over space but this ignores the INEVITABLE creation of new singularities - through the mechanism of quantum fluctuation the energy of inflation is converted into the energy of matter. This process is eternal, unending.

The Big Bang is not a singularity, not an event...but an ongoing process.
As ningualrity is a near-absolute. If it were completed it would suck up all of existence and all would implode into nothingness.

Here we are coming to the crux of the issue. Everything before was just a set-up, a preliminary step to this point.
Here is where you expose your religious infection.
Judaism and then Christianity are simply the western variant of the same Monist Nihilism.

You have o justification to assume a monad, a beginning in science, a fabric, a God-particle, in the same way a christian has no justification to presume a Creator.
Not only do you have on justification but your presupposition of an indivisible monad goes against all experience...it contradicts it. THIS is your nihilistic infection.
You propose an exception to the rule, and offer no reason to do so, except that this is how your brain works and so it seems to you as being logical.

The Greeks proposed the atom (indivisible) then this mythological construct went through many reincarnations, settling today in the Boson or the God Particle or the Big Bang...which recedes further back the closer to its "absolute" you come.
Everything is divisible because it is a human construct which fails repeatedly to represent the fluidity...or the absence of an absolute.
Herein lies the conflict between the ideal and the real; the theoretical and the actual.
You, probably infected with modern secular humanism, a follow-up to Marxism and Christianity/Islam, which comes from the Monotheistic Judaism, who got it Zaroastrism mot probably, is a logical continuance of a memetic line...that now warps science with its presumptions of a beginning and an end or this endless search for the presumed "fabric of reality".
You begin with a presumption...I do not. Then you search in reality for evidence that would justify your presumption...I build from the unknown towards the known.
I think from the bottom<>up you begin from the top<>Down.
We witness here a living, pragmatic example of how a meme can influence a mind and why Modnrity is characterized by an anti-nature, anti-reality, anti-sensuality Nihilism.

Nowhere in reality do we experience an indivisible, yet you presuppose it as if it were self-evident...because it fits into the logical continuum of your own prejudices.
Remember, the mathematical phrase 1+1=2 presupposes its own logic, making the sum the only rational end. yet, nowhere in nature is there any example of a ONE...because the concept is a human construct; a tool for understanding, freezing fluidity into a static state...like a snapshot freezes the tree in time/space and represents it, but is not it. The tree is changing continuously, as is the data stick, the film being used, but the image is static.

An absolute theory demands absolute evidence. We'll have to wait for the discovery of this nidivisible thing.

Thales wrote:: We cannot conceptualize anything without reducing it to a thingness- I agree, which is why I disclaimed that I would be meeting the issue of symbolizing the un-framed/unbounded/unlimited/infinite/universal reality on linguistic grounds. I explicitly brought a focus to the inaccuracy of language do avoid this sort of misinterpretation.

Therefore, when we use language we are using it symbolically, artistically.
We attempt to describe a fluid environment using static models, like a painter tries to depict movement using techniques of hue and shade on a two-dimensional canvas.

Thales wrote:: This space of writing, this conceptual space, is where we may begin to assess the likelihood of the universal whole, to claim that I am assuming it would be to ignore the nature of my investigation as an investigation.

an exploration, if it is honest and lucid, begins from the nil, not the ONE.
I begin as ignorant, not as knowing the absolute, and then working backwards to justify this presumption.
Religious fanatics do so.

Thales wrote:: You see no evidence for it, but others do. You may start with the assumption that they are wrong, but then you would not be participating in an argument you would be intellectually masturbating.

I also assume God is a fabrication, but I am not expected to prove a negative.
Mental masturbation is when one begins his hypocritical exploration with a conclusion...because he fears or is anxious or is incapable to think outside of its premises.

Others also see evidence for ghosts.
Am I to entertain every simpleton with a delusion?
You, being a secular version of a religious fanatic believe in what you cannot explain nor show...so we'll have to await for this indivisible thing to come about and save us from this ceaseless Flux.

Thales wrote:: If I define BEING relative to its linguistic function- the noun which give the verbs “is” and “are” their function, then I may begin to question the nature of those verbs. All words ARE. A word which isn't is not a word.

Yes...and all words are representations.

If I say Unicorn this does not make it real outside my brain.
An idea is judges by the amount and the quality of its references to sensuality...to sensual data, as it continuously streams into the brain.
The less connections it has to the world, the more fantastic the idea, the concept is....like God.
There is no absolute knowledge and so no absolute certainty...everything is measured by a degree of validation.
This because reality is ever-changing and so requires updating.

A more sophisticated idea is more timeless...it holds true for longer periods of time...it is applicable and useful for a linger duration.
The patterns it is built upon are more sophisticated, detailed, precise.
Nothing is eternal.

Thales wrote:: The same goes with all conceivable reality; all reality IS, a reality which isn't is not real. BEING as the noun which gives “is” its isness merits an investigation.

Talk about mental masturbation.
This type of verbal acrobatics does not flatter you.

Let me try to explain, as briefly as possible:
Because language is representational, symbolic, and ambiguous...and because the absolute is absent, words can comes about that imply the same thing while giving it a slight nuance, or the same concept can be symbolized by a different word to place it within a different context.

For example, the concept of the absolute has many variants: Here, Now, One, Whole, Thing, Truth, Self, God... IS...
Similarly, the concept of existence has many variants: World, Universe, Reality...

Using the word IS to define existence is an example of semantics, verbal complexity trying to pretend that it is saying something when it says nothing.

The crux is you believe in the indivisible, yet nowhere in evidence. monad.
You are a faith believer...and part of the same continuum which gave us a Monotheism.

Thales wrote:: If we are going to talk about reality, then we may need to define the term. The way I define it is: all that exists. The only prerequisite for being included in reality, is BEING. There is exactly ONE quality which all conceivable reality shares in common, it all exists.

I have defined it but you seem to have ignored it.

Exists = (inter)action.
What is active exists, what exists is active.
The concept of an immutable, indivisible thing, is anti-reality...anti-existence...you are a Nihilist. The "positive kind" as I call them, because you cloud your hatred of the world with a promise: a paradise, a Utopia...a coming indivisible particle.

Thales wrote:: This investigation is occurring in the realm of language, in order to participate you must meet it on its terms. If you choose different definitions then the ones I'm setting forward, then you are not arguing with me. Definition sets are relative, it is the space of argument, this conceptual space that may bridge the gap of definition.

Again...language is an art-form. I use it as such.
The word has a basic allusion. An implication.
We must agree on that if we are to communicate.

Now, if you choose to submit to the stringent definitions of your culture, your time and place, then I am willing to meet you there.
I think "indivisible" is a shared concept. So, I'll await evidence of it...or at least an argument that does not conflict with experience and that does not propose an exception to the rule, for no reason at all.
I see no indivisible anywhere...so I do not presume it. You presume it and go off to look for it.
This is not exploration...this is masturbation.

In the future they will look back at this time, as we do to our own past, and they will snicker at the bullshit that was popular in these Modern times.

Thales wrote:: Being is in evident in the realm of language. Is is. Are is. Being is.

Yes...and it is word, referring to a mental construct which, in turn, is a simplification/generalization, using sensual stimuli of a fluid environment. Being is a snapshot of Becoming.

Thales wrote:: This is the realm of language. You can attempt to point to the pre-conceptual, but to do that you must use concepts, just as I do. Now that we're looking at the language we're using, let's consider Becoming. Becoming IS. Becoming, the process, exists.

No, just as reality and consciousness are not separate, Becoming and Existence are two different words denoting the same process.
Becoming is not separate from existence.

There is no Thing Becoming.
There is no Thing which exists.

Thales wrote:: Process, exists. Flux exists. Being is evident in language, to annihilate being you would have to operate in a whole different sort of linguistic construct. Being is fundamental to expression.
Mistakes exist relative to an intention. What is my intention? If you don't know, then how can you label my word a mistake?
If you think you do know, then you are even more foolishly arrogant then I am.

Again, you are alluding to some hidden truth which I am ignorant of. I judge you by your words; how you (inter)act with me, just as I judge a cloud by how it (inter)acts with me.
This is how I gather data and form them into cohesive mental models.

So far you've proposed an indivisible Being, a Thing...which others have anthropomorphized as God.
Am I mistaken?

Thales wrote:: Objects are simplifications, but we are operating in a space of linguistic objects. We are operating in a field of simplification. No series of words can capture the reality, the everlasting tao is not the tao which can be named. I agree with you. I know what you are saying. But part of my investigation centers on language, and objects exist in language.

No, language symbolizes objects which exist as simplified abstractions in the brain.
These are tools, methods..useful if they are not taken literally.
They exist as a snapshot of a tree exists...but is not the tree itself.

Thales wrote:: These evolved methods, these logics, are the presuppositional grounds upon which we may begin to understand the perceptual world of another.
I want a live discussion because we cannot resolve the discrepancy of definition in anything other than real time. You say this is more efficient, I say this is stupidity, this is the entrenching of definition sets.

How is real-time linguistic exchanges different from written exchanges?
Only in efficiency.

Thales wrote:: I understand your concept of flux, and it is a valid description of the world of our precepts if we assume our remembered self to be a past self. It relies on a conception of time which is intuitive yet which does not reflect the best science available. Time is a measure of relation between reference frames- moments of consciousness constitute reference frames, thus we can measure between points in time, but we cannot measure an absolute progression of time. Time itself, outside of a reference frame exists undifferentiated- static.

Yes, your "reference frames" are my "snapshots".
They have the same utility and value as a snapshot does.

But it can also lead to delusion when the snapshot is taken as the actual phenomenon it depicts.

_________________
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
μηδέν άγαν

Guest

Satyr,

You desired to bring me back to your home territory before, and I indulged you.
Not you are demanding that I operate in your home territory of thought, your home territory of definition.
Have you stopped to think, 'His Being may be my Becoming?'

I know exactly what you are saying about depicting reality artistically, by keeping your perspective fluid so that it describes the flux. No narrative is absolute. There is no absolute description. The thing we are describing cannot be reduced, it is infinite.

You call it becoming because you believe that time proceeds forward relative to our minds.
I call it being, because outside of any reference frame, it does not move through time

Because you are dogmatic about your language you might want to correct me here to say that there is no IT which moves, there is only the motion, but then you'd be missing my central point for the third time.

Your descriptions are not the only descriptions. Other people see what you see.

I believe it makes more sense to CALL it Being because it more accurately reflects the nature of time.

If you do not want a term for Universe, or for Totality, or for All, then you don't have to use one. But some other people experience a well defined referent when they use those terms.

Wether it is something or nothing in flux is irrelevant, it depends on what something and nothing mean to you. The FLUX exists.

Spoken language allows for clarification and requests in real time. If you blather on in your language for a while and then I blather on in mine we will not be communicating. Live communication allows for an investigation of meaning rather than a pronouncement of *wrongness*. What is the meaning of my words, why am I using my words? The knowledge that I want it to point to will not be the knowledge you reach unless you learn my definitions. I can't speak to you unless I'm allowed to use my language. You are tyrannical over language. You think your language is truth.

You seem to know that no narrative is true, yet you are sold on yours. You are sold on yours because in it you see the signposts which point to your knowledge of the system. I may have the same knowledge of the system and use difference signposts.

I can tell you that you are not interpreting me the way that I interpret myself.

You are trying to have an argument with me by taking my words to have your definitions.

I have learned your definitions, I know what you are saying, the irony is that you approach me on my home territory demanding that I use your description. I like your description, I see how it is true. Yet you remain ignorant of my referent.

You believe that I presuppose something which is an exception to rules. Yet you think this because you've looked at my words and did not see my signposts.

You act as though monism is an INVALID narrative, yet your own philosophy is reduced to a single FLUX. The flux is all that is. All that is is in flux, so the flux is a foundational quality of all that is. A universe infinite in size can flux over infinite time, and yet the information contained -whether read through time or space- will be the same. The information content of the WHOLE flux, which occurs forever and in one instant is always the same.

An infinite universe were every part shifts into every-other is FLUX over time, and BEING over space.

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:50 pm

Thales wrote:: Satyr,

You desired to bring me back to your home territory before, and I indulged you.

Reality has no "home territory."
My words do not gain weight by being uttered here.
You expose that in the back of your mind it is the invisible watcher, the other, which concerns you.

Thales wrote:: Not you are demanding that I operate in your home territory of thought, your home territory of definition.
Have you stopped to think, 'His Being may be my Becoming?'

Being implies a static state....can you provide for us an example?
Becoming reflects the sensual perception of constant change.

If this is "my home turf" then it is but an island in a sea of your type of thinking: Monist, Monotheistic, Absolutist, Nihilistic crap.
Parmenideis dominates...Heralcitus is revered by a few.

Thales wrote:: I know exactly what you are saying about depicting reality artistically, by keeping your perspective fluid so that it describes the flux. No narrative is absolute. There is no absolute description. The thing we are describing cannot be reduced, it is infinite.

THAT is a presumtion.
Before the infinite all finite conceptions are leveled down and equalized.

I do not deal in your absolutism....if you do not have an absolute THING you require an absolute nothing.
"Infinity" is a term given to man's unknown ignorance.
I deal in gradations...superior/inferior...stronger/weaker...probable/improbable....

Thales wrote:: You call it becoming because you believe that time proceeds forward relative to our minds.

No...there is no forward.
Forward is merely a towards entropy...never reaching an end.
To this towards (Will TO Power...Will to Life...Will to Order) life (re)acts Becoming an antithesis...a towards Order.

Here the absolutes of Order/Chaos are used as signposts. They are mental tools for understanding, for orienting...not actual places.

Let me clarify, in brief:
Flow is a linear designation. It means a towards entropy or its opposite a towards order. The Big bang and the future coming Big Crunch are the binary representations of this 4 dimensional model.
Flux is multidimensional. Here, in theory, entropy is increasing and decreasing or any variant of the two.
But because life is an ordering in the disordering it can only experience linear temporality.

Order: Decrease in randomness - a deflation of space/time, as space is a projection of possibility and time is the measurement of change within this possible, in reference to the observer.
Chaos: Increase in randomness - an inflation of possibility (space) and the decrease of patterns of (inter)activity (order), which is matter/energy.

Randomness has no pattern, by definition, and so the mind cannot process it...it cannot perceive. It interprets this lack as darkenss, void, black etc.

Thales wrote:: I call it being, because outside of any reference frame, it does not move through time

This is a presupposition with no validity.
You cannot make any assumptions about what lies "outside your reference frame" particularly when this assumptions contradict what leis within your reference frame.

I do not assume that what I do not know is the reverse of what I do know.
This is Nihilism.
Judaism and Christianity, and Islam and segments of Hinduism do this.

Thales wrote:: Because you are dogmatic about your language you might want to correct me here to say that there is no IT which moves, there is only the motion, but then you'd be missing my central point for the third time.

Your descriptions are not the only descriptions. Other people see what you see.

This, once more, is an assumption.
Having been told what I think you now claim that you already knew as much, when before you claimed opposite views.

Thales wrote:: I believe it makes more sense to CALL it Being because it more accurately reflects the nature of time.

"Nature of Time"?
Time has no meaning outside the human brain. It is a measuring standard...like the metric system.
It measures change...more precisely it measures, using human metabolic rates, the divergence between one and the next mental abstraction.

Reality is (inter)action.

Thales wrote:: If you do not want a term for Universe, or for Totality, or for All, then you don't have to use one. But some other people experience a well defined referent when they use those terms.

"Well defined"?
Really?
It's not ambiguous?

So, by universe you, and those like you, do not project themselves "outside" space/time and then turn back, as gods, to say : "There lies a Thing...a Uni-verse".?
Does your universe have boundaries?

It is, I agree, a useful TOOL.

Thales wrote:: Wether it is something or nothing in flux is irrelevant, it depends on what something and nothing mean to you. The FLUX exists.

You really cannot break free from your linguistic addictions.
activity does not exist, it IS existence.
These are terms describing the same concept.

If I call the absolute Being or God or Thing or One is a matter of culture or upbringing...they all denote the same concept.

Thales wrote:: What is the meaning of my words, why am I using my words?

A word with no referent is nonsensical....like God....it too is a word.
It can mean anything because of the very fact that it is absent...it has no reference point outside the human brain.

Now, you show me a Being....or a Thing...or Time.

Thales wrote:: The knowledge that I want it to point to will not be the knowledge you reach unless you learn my definitions. I can't speak to you unless I'm allowed to use my language. You are tyrannical over language. You think your language is truth.

No, actually you are so. You've adopted the modern, the current, the academic lingo and you wish to remain loyal to it, refusing to consider language as what it is.

You claim that merely saying "being" or "Unicorn" makes the concept real.
No, the abstraction is real, as it is a process of biology, which construct a noetic model. In the purest sense of the term it has no existence, as it is pure fantasy.
Show me an indivisible particle, which is like the Christian immutable God.
You cannot.

So, now you ask me to reject my senses and simply try to get into your brain, infected with a cultural paradigm, accepting the inherit logic which is taken as self-evident, so that we might agree.
But we will agree, eventually, if I accept your self-evident premises, and remain loyal to the academic usage of words.

We are a culture given over to the absolute.
This is why - on a side-note - our western world is declining into this non-spiritual state where men have lost all direction.

My definitions are so alien to you, though you profess to know them...and to know of what I speak of.
Then you return me to your mythologies.

Thales wrote:: You seem to know that no narrative is true, yet you are sold on yours.

Here you expose your absolutist mindset.

Here you expose your prejudiced Modernity.

To consider my opinion superior does not mean I must accept it as absolutely correct.
There's no either/or scenario.
My perspective is either weaker or stronger than yours...neither is absolutely correct.

Thales wrote:: You are sold on yours because in it you see the signposts which point to your knowledge of the system. I may have the same knowledge of the system and use difference signposts.

Let us see where they lead, shall we?

This expression of perspectivism is not flattering.
Liberals use it to equate all cultures, all individuals, all kinds, under the premise that we are all equally ignorant so all opinions are equally respectable.
Ignorance is not an argument; weakness is not a strength.

What Judeo-Christian crap!!!
Monist, you truly are.

Did you notice what you did?
Typical.
You have now diverted the topic from one about the world to one about me.

Thales wrote:: I can tell you that you are not interpreting me the way that I interpret myself.

You underestimate me.
I like it. I prefer it.

But let me ask you a question:
Does a dog know itself more than a human does?
Can a chimpanzee comprehend itself more than its human master can?

Your defensiveness is duly noted.

Thales wrote:: You are trying to have an argument with me by taking my words to have your definitions.

No, I am suing the words as they are intended to be used.
Being is a static term.
It is wrongly used when trying to describe a dynamic process.

But our culture is infected with this literal usage of terms.

Many think empathy automatically means sympathy.
Some thing that saying "I" means you know what, the fuck, you are referring to.
Many say "here" and they actually believe it is a static, immutable, place.
Many believe that they do not need.

Thales wrote:: I have learned your definitions, I know what you are saying, the irony is that you approach me on my home territory demanding that I use your description. I like your description, I see how it is true. Yet you remain ignorant of my referent.

Another allusion.
Show me your referent.

Begin with Being.
Show me an indivisible Monad.

If you want me to see the referent then I already have: it is in your mind.
You seem happy in the perspective that you know what I am saying, because I have been clear and direct, but that I am unable to see what you are saying, when it was part of my consciousnesses many years ago.

Thales wrote:: You act as though monism is an INVALID narrative, yet your own philosophy is reduced to a single FLUX.

Again...you claim to know what i am saying and then you say that showing how much you do not know.

What did I say?
What did I say about language?
What did I say about language and how it creates paradoxes?

Did I not mention two examples:
"Truth is there is no truth" & "There are absolutely no absolutes"
What did I say about the inherit, presupposed, logic, which is reaffirmed, in the mathematical phrase: 1+1=2?

When someone asks: What is changing?
One presupposes the very thing being asked for.
The very fact that he demands to be given a thing, which is changing, is a corruption of free exploration...something statisticians do.
The question, in fact, is nonsensical.

Here we can also see the difference between the Ideal, which is in the mind, and the real which resides outside the mind.
Here inside and outside make sense, because life, consciousness is an ordering and so it created porous walls around itself to create order. Your skin for example, is an organic wall between you, an ordering, and the world, disordering.
But that takes us way off track so I will not get into it.

Thales wrote:: The flux is all that is. All that is is in flux, so the flux is a foundational quality of all that is. A universe infinite in size can flux over infinite time, and yet the information contained -whether read through time or space- will be the same. The information content of the WHOLE flux, which occurs forever and in one instant is always the same.

You are obsessed with preserving the conlcusion.
The only place there is a "whole" is in the mind that creates it by simplifying/generalizing, abstracting a fluid reality into a static representation...a representation that must remain ambiguous, because simplifications depends on this ambiguity.

If what you propose is not a contradiction to what is experienced...then you should have no problem showing me an example of a "whole".
If you cannot, then what you propose is a direct contradiction to sensual experience, an exception to the rule.

Your other option then is to do what religious fanatics do, and try to slander sensuality, by claiming that the world is an illusion or to imply that the senses did not evolve to aid us but to trick us....or do what Kant, that cunt did, and simply imply a mysterious thing-in-itself, like the soul.

Thales wrote:: An infinite universe were every part shifts into every-other is FLUX over time, and BEING over space.

And I'm telling you this conception is a metaphor, an allegory.

----------------------------------------------
A few other description.
In Brief.

Existence is (inter)activity...synonyms.
(Inter)Activity creates friction...the loss of energies when two aggregate flows converge and (Inter)act.
This loss is what results in entropy, a slow uniformity of space/time where the probable (order, a pattern) is reduced to the possible.
The equalization of all possibilities being uniformity...veering towards infinity but never getting there.

Friction simply means the exchange of energies between divergent flows of it, resulting in a partial loss of energies, or a convergence towards a median state: uniformity.

Order is the diminishment of possibility into a singularity (the near absolute probable). The near absolute is never completes and so existence persists.
If it would there would be an end: absolute order or randomness would mean an end to existing.
In order possibilities are limited to the almost absolute state of a singular possibility.

Randomness, or Chaos, also a near absolute state, is the absence of probability since all is becoming increasingly possible.
Matter, being a variant of ordering, and energy as well, begin to level off inot randomness.

As the near absolute random space/time is neared everything becomes equally possible, including the emergence of near-absolute states of order....new Big Bangs begin, or singularities collapse towards near-absolute order.

_________________
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
μηδέν άγαν

Guest

Heraclitus is listed as a monist according to wikipedia.

"The following pre-Socratic philosophers described reality as being monistic:

[...]

Heraclitus: Change, symbolized by fire (in that everything is in constant flux)."

Guest

I like the analogy by Heraclitus: female = wet and male = dry.
Panta rhei (everything flows) ergo: A good (male) soul is dry.
Dryness must be the appropriate reaction to natures "wetness" (femininity).
He gives credit to the underlying principle of nature, just as much as to the consequence this implies from man towards it.

Thales gets lost in water, as his constituted essential element of everything.
Thales gives in to the feminine. To nature. This is the way of decline.
Heraclitus chose the path of resistance, which is fight, struggle for survival.
So I would assume Thales to be way more popular today in the "Feminization of Mankind" (title of one of Satyrs essays),
since his Philosophy supports this Feminization. Monism is not the issue here.
Many esoterics after the great philosophers have claimed that the transformatory essence is a flame from water (violet flame). From the purely monist perspective I'd favor Thales. But Heraclitus, I think wasn't a monist, but reactionary to Thales, with his fire/flux-"monism". He foresaw the Feminization of Mankind.

Guest

Laconian,

I see your contention. We can give in to nature or we can resist it I suppose, but what would a resistance of nature look like? Wouldn't an unnatural object have to be pushing against nature? Are you an unnatural object?

We are part of the same process, the monism is the issue here because if you realize that, then you realize that at the heart of your identity- below the habits and customs, below the emotions and values- is a simple observer. It's simplicity is its strength; it cannot be folded, it cannot be bent, it is only a point. In your perception, where your head should be there is a great void. The center of this great void is a point, a simple point of observation.

To center your being is to rest your energies on that central axis, to involve your sense of self outward from that center is to produce eccentricity.

If you live eccentrically, you will not maximize the use of your energies.

It is a pragmatic issue. Where, in your consciousness, do you rest that sense of self? If you center it, then there is no fear of involvement because you know that your involvement precedes the sensory. If you place your self outside the center, in the conditions of the world, then you have a great fear for what may happen to it. You can identity with part of the flux, with streams in the whirlpool, or you can identify with the point, with the center. The point, the center, is immovable- it has strength.

The way to stay dry is by becoming the center around which the whirlpool moves. You will not be wet, you will be masculine, you will be godly, when you have removed your sense of identification from the conditions of the water.

If you try to fight the water you will get wet. Be the point around which the water moves.

Guest

What got me here and what I recommend are Satyrs youtube vids. Check them out, definitely (Youtube User: stickysound, stored them after they were taken off)!

I think one cannot talk about any "religiosity". One should keep that to oneself. Be as religious as you can be, as spiritual, but try to talk about it as little as possible or the New Atheists will rip you apart. You might enjoy John David Ebert's talks on youtube on books by Peter Sloterdijk, a contemporary German Philosopher, especially on Spheres. The Kathodos Website, or Aryan Buddhism Blog as well. But to our discussion visit Satyrs vids first, especially on the male/female difference. The sexes.

"If you try to fight the water you will get wet. Be the point around which the water moves. "

And therefor you've got to stay dry. (Masculine in spirit.)

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Sun Jan 20, 2013 7:51 pm

My ideas are counter-intuitive because they expose the nature of intuition and why it must be counter.

Life is an ordering; thinking is an ordering.
Both emerge, or can only emerge, in a temporally linear direction as a reaction to entropy.
This makes them antagonistic towards chaos/entropy, the coming future, and attracted to the past.
The past is always a state of more order in a reality where entropy is increasing.

Consciousness, as Heidegger claimed, is a "looking back."
Intelligence gains an advantage, as a sophistication of consciousness, because it can sample the past, as far back as possible, find patterns in it, construct mental-models (abstractions) and then project these forward (imagination), towards the unknown, increasingly chaotic, future.

This is a preemptive, and risky, endeavor.
If successful it offers the mind, serving an organism, the advantage of efficiency: focused energies that can overpower and overcome more powerful aggregate energies because they are focused, rather than dispersed, though they may be weaker.
Trial and error naturally selects the most effective...and we have the evolution of intelligence.

Given that language, including math, is a symbol of a mental abstraction (a simplified, generalized, mental model) it must use absolutes: human artifices.
- The quality of the mental model (abstraction) is determined by the quality of the brain creating it. A more complex mind creates more complex models, or models incorporating more sensual data in a cohesive whole.

But how can we define a fluid environment lacking absolutes by using absolute constructs?
Artistry...the same way an artist can pains water flowing...using language as one would use shades and light, and hues.
When taken literally then "in the beginning there was the word (logos)" and the bullshit begins.

In fact, in the "beginning" there was only action...and logos was what tried to describe it.
When taken literally a word becomes nonsensical...because ti has no external referent and, more importantly, it must remain ambiguous so as to pretend to be an absolute.

Ask someone to define the #1.
He cannot. It can be anything; it can apply to anything...because ti is a symbol.
Ask them to ten show you a "thing"...or a whole.

They cannot, because these are human concepts which exist in the human mind as ambiguities.
These can also refer to anything, once the perceived phenomenon, the apparent, is conveniently boxed into a four dimensional abstraction.
Theoretical multidimensional space is then added in so as to enlarge the box...either towards the microcosmic or towards the macrocosmic.

The phenomenon, to become a concept, must be detached from the Flux...from reality. It must become a thought.

-------------------
Need is the consciousness, sensation, of entropy upon an ordering emergent unity.
Suffering an extreme of the latter.

Need produces the (re)action, the towards order, contrary to entropy.
Like swimming against the current.

Nihilism is the surrender to the current...the feminine abandonment to what is stronger.
Masculinity resists, despite the inevitability of the outcome. A burst of light in the darkness.
Masculinity projects its goal as an absolute state of order: singularity.
God is a primitive representation of it.
If projected as a desirable Self, then it is masculine, but if it is projected as a desirable Other, towards which one must swim, strive, to belong to, then it is quintessentially feminine.
In this case the feminine has not given in to her nature but has been seduced by a masculine ideal.
The feminine simply wishes to belong to the strongest, the biggest, the most powerful; she is attracted to it intuitively.
Mortal men eventually disappointing a female as their flaws make them less than omnipotent and so the alternative is always around the corner.

The male always makes do with what is available; he endures and utilizes and manipulates the environment to his advantage.
We see this in sexuality as a masculine drive to tolerate feminine weakness, inferiority, so as to attain an end. All a man wants is control over the environment, females being part of this environment.

_________________
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
μηδέν άγαν

Guest

Satyr wrote:: My ideas are counter-intuitive because they expose the nature of intuition and why it must be counter.

Sorry for flooding with this youtubers (kathodosdotcom) vids, but to me these are the deepest insights into the "nature of intuition"...

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Wed Feb 13, 2013 7:05 am

What hatred of life.
The mind so desperate to escape its source, inventing absurdities to justify this desperation.

How wonderful that life is defined as a "sickness."

The self-consciousness thinking it is other than consciousness.
Schizophrenia...of dualism.

_________________
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
μηδέν άγαν

Guest

Satyr wrote:: What hatred of life.

I think this guy actually embraces life. See his more recent vids (if you wish) on Phytagoras. He worked his way out of the matrix within his cirumstances and genetic make up.

Quote :: The mind so desperate to escape its source, inventing absurdities to justify this desperation.

The mind isn't desperate to escape its source. It happens. It's the fall into the unconciousness (world/duality) that the Gnosis/Kabbala (and I guess Neoplatonism) talk about. The desperation is to get back (within the mind), while still wandering around on this earth, in this world, but seeing beyond the veil. Seeing clearly. And therefor being more capable also, without this being any sort of progressivist aim, as it is in modern cults like Scientology, but merely a side product of growing awareness/liberation.

Quote :: How wonderful that life is defined as a "sickness."

You want to attach some kind of Nihilism to Buddhism. I'd agree if you refered to it's modern forms. But with original doctrine: I am not sure, to say the least. But the Buddha was lacking the metaphysical explanations of the greek, like Plotinus. That's why for your demands, Plotinus would be a more promising source. I cannot offer my views on him yet.
And he might exceed my intellectual capacity.

But don't you talk about 2 types of Nihilism? You might just lean towards the other type of Nihilism pointing your finger at this type.

Quote :: The self-consciousness thinking it is other than consciousness.
Schizophrenia...of dualism."

This is exactly the state of every man wandering on this earth, who has not realized that he comes from non-duality. An "Absolute" (that is not completely defined since the Buddha left out the question of the origins of the "Nous" and/or the Universe itself or simply said: there is no origin.).

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Wed Feb 13, 2013 6:58 pm

I am a tightrope walker...balance.

I want to find the perfect point right in the middle between the one and the nil, a state of limbo.
I reject both forms of Nihilism seeing life as this in-between state.
I wish to stay here...as long as I can.

But the Flux means that the center point is shifting...and so even absolute limbo is absent.

_________________
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
μηδέν άγαν

Guest

Satyr wrote:: I am a tightrope walker...balance.

Yes, balance.

Quote :: I reject both forms of Nihilism seeing life as this in-between state.

I highlighted the word "reject" in this phrase. Rejection is force. (I tried some actual tightrope walking 2 years ago.) You cannot reach equilibrium by force. If you use force, the rope will swing to much and you will fall off. It's about inner equilibrium. Even if on the outside you have to move.

I don't reject Nihilism as a tool. (Only as an overall life outlook, I do not wish to fall into it.) I see both kinds of Nihilism as necessary tools though. I cannot make an overall case for buddhist practice and haven't watched the Sparta docus yet. (Concerning your claim that Buddhas idea of ascetism was opposite to the spartan kind.) But I want to use them as an analogy to point something out.

1.)So we have the Indian Tantra. The Brahmanism. The Nihilism towards the absolute One.

2.) Then we have for example the tibetan Vajrayana, that contains a Nihilism towards the absolute Nil.

How can these be used as tools then?

If you lead a happy ordered life and everything is near perfect, in your perspective, you tend towards the Brahmanism (1). If you're on survival mode and have to struggle to get by, you'd likely favor the Vajrayana (0). Because Brahmanism is about embracing life, while the tibetan practices are about seeing the phenomena as empty space.

So that is it. Tools, one shouldn't get lost in. Of course in either case an absolute is stated and the tools can be looked at as two paths to reach for this absolute. But that would then be religion, I guess.

Guest

With your distinction of the two types of Nihilism, you of course invite people to look at them as tools. One of course shouldn't underestimate the state of Nihilism, as in depression, hedonistic empty consumerism, and all the modern forms of decay, that false guided activity leads to, that is not rooted in traditionalist values.

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Sun Feb 17, 2013 4:43 pm

Laconian wrote:

Satyr wrote:: I am a tightrope walker...balance.

Yes, balance.

Quote :: I reject both forms of Nihilism seeing life as this in-between state.

I highlighted the word "reject" in this phrase. Rejection is force. (I tried some actual tightrope walking 2 years ago.) You cannot reach equilibrium by force. If you use force, the rope will swing to much and you will fall off. It's about inner equilibrium. Even if on the outside you have to move.

I don't reject Nihilism as a tool. (Only as an overall life outlook, I do not wish to fall into it.) I see both kinds of Nihilism as necessary tools though. I cannot make an overall case for buddhist practice and haven't watched the Sparta docus yet. (Concerning your claim that Buddhas idea of ascetism was opposite to the spartan kind.) But I want to use them as an analogy to point something out.

1.)So we have the Indian Tantra. The Brahmanism. The Nihilism towards the absolute One.

2.) Then we have for example the tibetan Vajrayana, that contains a Nihilism towards the absolute Nil.

How can these be used as tools then?

If you lead a happy ordered life and everything is near perfect, in your perspective, you tend towards the Brahmanism (1). If you're on survival mode and have to struggle to get by, you'd likely favor the Vajrayana (0). Because Brahmanism is about embracing life, while the tibetan practices are about seeing the phenomena as empty space.

So that is it. Tools, one shouldn't get lost in. Of course in either case an absolute is stated and the tools can be looked at as two paths to reach for this absolute. But that would then be religion, I guess.

The Brahmanical Monism is just as modern as what the Tibetans mean by "Emptiness" in Vajrayana today. Just because the practise is abused and "gurus" who were once one's own fathers have now degenerated to some cultist, doesn't make the theory unsound.
If you enjoy your Body, and Domination, Power, Self-possession, and have the capacity to Enjoy this, then there's nothing un-sound abt. Vajra-yana - the way of the Thunder-perfect mind:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon May 13, 2013 11:29 am

Quote :: "The Parmenidean escape was not the flight from the world taken by the Hindu philosophers; it was not evoked by a profound religious conviction as to the depravity, ephemerality and accursedness of human existence. Its ultimate goal, peace in being, was not striven after as though it were the mystic absorption into one all-sufficing ecstatic state of mind which is the enigma and vexation of ordinary minds. Parmenides' thinking conveys nothing whatever of the dark intoxicating fragrance of Hindu wisdom which is not entirely absent from Pythagoras and Empedocles. No, the strange thing about his philosophic feat at this period is just its lack of fragrance, of color, soul, and form, its total lack of blood, religiosity and ethical warmth. What astonishes us is the degree of schematism and abstraction (in a Greek!), above all, the terrible energetic striving for certainty in an epoch which otherwise thought mythically and whose imagination was highly mobile and fluid. "Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "and if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away every-thing that comes-to-be, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Sun Sep 01, 2013 8:34 pm

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Guest

They find themselves between their two absolutes (0 and 1, black and white), desire either but cannot have as they're purely imaginary, so they fire up and off into fantasy land where their god awaits them, to relieve them of their suffering/self-loathing, the source of which they will not face. The space between is reality/nature, which is where the pains lie. In my exchanges with him over youtube he showed a strange inability to grasp that there is this third option: nature/What We Know ("works"). In this case it was what we know (generally and thus far) needs to be done in order for a surviving and subsequently thriving society; things I suggested as necessary, he could not accept as anything other than my personal preferences... i.e. 0/1 ("his preferences vs. mine") followed by auto-ignoring of reality (the 3rd option), reality without care for what one thinks, and isn't necessarily what one personally prefers/desires. I find this disturbing... the underlying implications, that is.

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Wed Sep 11, 2013 8:55 am

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon Nov 04, 2013 10:51 am

Parmenides Revisionism.

Quote :: "Despite all this, Parmenides was again and again accused of denying the reality of the phenomenal world. Decisive in this respect was not so much Plato’s own dictum that “all is one,” but rather the overpowering force of Platonism and its “two-world-doctrine” that assumes the separate existence of an “intelligible” and a “sensible” world and regards Forms as transcendent substances. It was to this distorted, ultimately anti-Platonic image of Plato that Parmenides’ philosophy was made to conform, thus elevating it to the prototype of a vulgar world-denying Platonism. While in Plato’s thought the “sensible world” still maintains its status, if only as ontologically deficient, in the “Platonized” Parmenides it disappears altogether, dismissed as deception and illusion. Illuminating in this regard is the inter- pretation of the chariot ride in the poem’s proemium as an “as- cent” that anticipates the climb into the Beyond portrayed in Plato’s Phaedrus. But this proemium does not contain the least reference to an upward “ascent”; instead, it leaves the topography of the chariot’s path strikingly vague, describing the ride only as a departure from the usual, customary and normal. Not surprisingly, the highpoint of this Platonizing interpretation of Parmenides is found in Neo-Platonism, in which Parmenidean Being is utterly reinterpreted as a prelude to the Neo-Platonic One.

Even today, the notion of monism determines research on Parmenides to a great extent. It is too seldom acknowledged that even a statement such as “all is one” cannot eliminate plu- rality, but rather implies a dialectical relationship between uni- ty and multiplicity and in no way permits an adaptation into an assertion of the type “there is only one thing whose name is Being.”17 Yet most interpretations tend to make just such an assumption, however they may go on to interpret or evaluate it. The direct path to this view is taken in the interpretation of the Parmenidean eon as a collective noun referring to the totality of all that is – a totality which is thus melted down to an undif- ferentiated unity, giving rise to that peculiar unworldly creature called “the one Being.”"[Panagiotis Thanassas, Parmenides, Cosmos, and Being]

Quote :: "The device of presenting the entire poem from 1.24 on as the speech of a goddess is poetically unique. Her role evokes comparison with that Muse whom the poet calls upon at the beginning of the Homeric epics as the source of his narra- tive. Assigning certain, true and indubitable knowledge to the gods had had a long tradition,28 but led to divergent attitudes. Whereas Hesiod, for instance, appealed to the divine author- ity of the Muses and presented himself as inspired by them in a thoroughly “honest” and true poetical narrative, Xenophanes preferred a skeptical stance that denied human beings any pos- sibility of reliable knowledge. Parmenides, in contrast, asserts both the divinity and the attainability of true knowledge. The chosen poet is indeed apprised of the truth, and he can carry out his vague “impulse,” even if this is only possible by becom- ing the “consort” (1.24) of divine charioteers and by “arriving” at the house of this goddess (1.25). But the divine nature of true knowledge here takes a completely novel turn, and the meaning of Parmenides’ calling upon a divine entity goes far beyond the merely extrinsic authorization of the poem. Re- course to the goddess might seem like a step backwards com- pared to the philosophers who were already articulating their theories in their own names. But this is not a relapse into a long obsolete, naïve, archaic stance, but rather a conscious and intentional employment of revelation as “the natural surface cover for this most radical of all philosophies.”

The question of the relation between Aletheia and Doxa reveals what is perhaps its most interesting aspect when it is posed as the question of the transition from “all too human” Doxa to the Aletheia – that is, as a question of the disengagement of humans from their conditioned existence, and of their attain- ing the truth of Being at the end of a journey that extends “far from the step of humans.” In this context, the encounter with the goddess proves to be neither an authentic “experience,” nor an antiquated artifice designed to bestow credibility upon the philosophy of Being. Rather, that encounter posits the ques- tion of the origin of philosophy. Since Parmenides, the self-de- scription of philosophy as a divine gift has become somewhat canonical. This account, however, does not answer the question of philosophy’s origin, but states explicitly that this question is one that can only be “answered” in the language of myth.
In his orchestration of the wondrous journey and the encoun- ter with the goddess, Parmenides not only succeeds in integrat- ing the mythical element into the sphere of philosophy, but also in showing its limits. The path to the philosophy of Being can only be “grounded” by a mythical goddess, and this means that philosophy cannot give an account of its own origin by means of concepts. The Parmenidean dea ex machine, used here as the midwife of ontology, contributes nothing to the content of truth. She does not turn Parmenides’ poem into a “revealed philosophy” and does not place it under the dominion of “mysticism.” Divine presence is crucial and indispensable only as a sign of the impossibility of achieving conceptual mastery of the path that leads to philosophy. It is a mark of philosophy’s groundlessness."[Panagiotis Thanassas, Parmenides, Cosmos, and Being]

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon Nov 04, 2013 11:20 am

And human psychology now centered around the erotic, the feminine sexual desire, the only antithesis to death permitted.
The need to unite the multiplicity into a singularity, replicating multiplicity, because the arrow of time points towards randomness and not, like Eros/Cupid, towards the singularity of one.

Parmenides reigns supreme, via Plato, and Freud makes sex the center of all human nature.
No other attitude towards death, dissimulation, disintegration, is permitted.
All must join into larger, and larger wholes so as to deal with the increasing chaos.

The reduction of identity, of consciousness, is how internal harmony is produced.
A sacrifice of self, to preserve self.

_________________
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
μηδέν άγαν

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon Nov 04, 2013 11:53 am

Satyr wrote:: And human psychology now centered around the erotic, the feminine sexual desire, the only antithesis to death permitted.
The need to unite the multiplicity into a singularity, replicating multiplicity, because the arrow of time points towards randomness and not, like Eros/Cupid, towards the singularity of one.

Parmenides reigns supreme, via Plato, and Freud makes sex the center of all human nature.
No other attitude towards death, dissimulation, disintegration, is permitted.
All must join into larger, and larger wholes so as to deal with the increasing chaos.

The reduction of identity, of consciousness, is how internal harmony is produced.
A sacrifice of self, to preserve self.

Yes; via Nietzsche and Sloterdijk, Empedocles' "Strife" / neikos [Gk.?] was all but forgotten.

I excerpted the above to retain the Fact there was Parmenides with whom philosophy was at its hem, at the fringe borders Still touching mythology, and then there was a Platonization of Parmenides' fragments from which the whole history of absolute Being gains momentum.
In this proper differentiation, Heidegger was right to see in Parmenides, a greek view, a model of truth and perspective of the world still uncorrupt by exoteric Platonization.

Continuing with what you say, just want to remark Sloterdijk's book 'You must change your life' takes Thymos to an excellent level; this book is just fantastic.

With Thymos / separation / discrimination, Sloterdijk draws on the figure of the Ascetic and a whole thymotic-sociology of Asceticism; some excerpts:

Sloterdijk wrote:: Let us reiterate: entering ethical thought means making a difference with one's very own existence that no one had previously made. If there were an accompanying speech act, it would be: 'I herewith exit ordinary reality.' Secession from the habitual world as the first ethical operation introduces an unknown division into the world. It not only divides humanity asymmetrically into the group of the knowing, who leave, and the unknowing, who remain in the place of vulgar doom; it also inevitably implies a declaration of war by the former on the latter.

Going through with the secession means splitting the world. The operator is the one who, by leaving, cuts the world's surface into two initially irreconcilable regions: the zone of the leavers and that of the stayers. Through this cut, both sides learn first of all that the world, which previously seemed to be common to all people, a many-headed but inseparable and unconfrontable unity, is in truth a separable and confrontable phenomenon. The withdrawal of the ascetic is the knife that makes the cut in the continuum. From that point, the world appears in a completely new light - indeed, perhaps one can only posit the existence of a 'world', in the sense of moral-cosmic reaches for the whole that are coded in advanced-civilized terms, once it has been divided by the new class of deniers and reconstituted at a higher level. The whole, previously a confused multiplicity of forces with a vague basis for unity, now becomes a strained synthesis of the unequal parts produced by the cut.

Owing to the exodus of the ascetics, meditators and thinkers, it becomes the site of a drama that fundamentally questions its ability to house ethically aroused inhabitants sufficiently: what is this world if the strongest statement about it is a withdrawal from it? The great world theatre deals with the duel between the secessionists and the settled, those who flee from the world and those who remain-in-the-world."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon Nov 04, 2013 11:53 am

Sloterdijk wrote:: "I am hinting at a spiritual form of spatial planning that negotiates over deeper borders than those which can be addressed by any geopolitics. The spaces created by the secessionists - we can think for the time being of the hermitages, the monasteries, the academies and other places of ascetic-meditative and philosophical retreat - would, in the better days of cultural Marxism, undoubtedly have been termed mundane bases of the 'spirit of utopia'. As utopias in the precise sense of the word are only narratively evoked images of better worlds that do not exist anywhere in the real world, however, this term is unsuitable to characterize the localities created via secession. Secession produces real spaces. It sets up borders behind which a genuinely different mode of being dictates its will.

The first real heterotopia is the spatial type that, building on the Heraclitean image of the river into which one never steps twice, I have called the shore. Places with shore qualities can be projected onto all corners of the inhabited earth - de (acto, they come about wherever those practising parties who have resolved to secede step out of the river of habits. They constitute the first bridgeheads of eccentricity.

In fact, the literary media of the early Modern Age in Europe made a strong practice medium available to laypersons. Open a book, read a line, and your one-minute anachoresis has been realized. For years, the book has served the contemplative as a vehicle for withdrawal 'to the country home of the self'.

What Helmuth Plessner ascribes to 'man' in general, namely the 'eccentric positionality' of his self-relation, is in reality an effect of the use of egotechnic media in the Modern Age - media which, in the course of a few centuries, equipped virtually every individual with the necessary tools for a mild chronic being-outside-themselves: the prayer formula, the confessional mirror, the novel, the diary, the portrait, the photograph, newspapers and radio media, and not least mirrors on all sides. Provided with this equipment for self-techniques, individuals developed a second attitude towards their first position almost unnoticed. Barely any of the moderns who assert the human right for 'one's own space' are aware of the origin of this demand in a revision of social topology from the distant past."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon Nov 04, 2013 11:54 am

Sloterdijk wrote:: "The basic subject-forming exercise of which I will speak in the following is clearly none other than the methodically performed withdrawal from the complex of shared situations one calls 'life' or 'the world'. From now on, 'being in the world' will mean suum tantum curare: to care for what is one's own and nothing else, against all dissipation into the non-own.

By separating my power and its jurisdiction from all other powers and competencies, I open up a narrowly defined sphere of influence in which my ability, my wanting, but above all my mission to shape my own existence ascend, as it were, to autonomous rule. The critical dis tinction that enables this promotion made its first explicit appearance on Western soil among the Stoics, who, in a perpetual exercise, put all their energy into separating the things that depend on us from those that do not. Own or non-own - this is the question that provides the sharp-edged canon, the yardstick for measuring all circumstances. This cut divides the universe into two areas, from which the operator naturally only chooses their own half, the one that is decisive for themselves. That is why the typical axioms of the Stoics begin with 'It is in your power . . .'

Anthropotechnic work on oneself begins with the evacuation of the interior through a removal of the non-own. We now see what is meant by the image of the ontological 'local government reorganiza tion' used above: it shows the turn towards that which depends on me and the turn away from everything else. The student of wisdom starts from the intuition that their chance is based on the separation of the two regions of being. The clear distinction between them takes on the greatest significance for what they do or do not do in any given situation .

The first is the region of the own; the Latin Platonists termed it the realm of the 'inner human', and claimed that only there was the truth at home: in interiore homine habitat veritas, usually under exclusion of one's own body, while the yogis and gymnosophists of the East incorporated it into the interior. Within my enclave, there is nothing to which I can be indifferent, as I bear responsibility for everything here, down to the smallest details; for me, it is simply a matter of not desiring anything I cannot have and not avoiding any thing that is meant for me.

The second area encompasses the entire rest of the world, which is suddenly known as the outside, the saecu/um, and faces me like an exile populated by random things. What begins thus is the long walk of the soul through an 'outside world' of which no one quite understands any longer why it has receded into the outlandish - namely, because of the ontological separation of the non-own and the congealment of the previously shared encompassing situation into an aggregate of objects that have now become distant and indifferent. In truth, the protagonists of the great secession are doing everything to alienate the world; but they remain incapable of understanding how their own contributions ensure that, in the panorama of sensory per ception, the 'objects' emerge and an alien entity known as the 'outside world' comes about through the sum of these objects.

Marcus Aurelius tell us: 'Matters outside our doors stand there by themselves neither knowing nor telling us anything about themselves.' Subject to poor sensuality and meagre materiality, the 'external' truly has no choice but to stop at the entrance to the separated ego. All it is good for now is serving as an opposite pole to withdrawal, flight and contempt (anachoresis, fuga saecuii, contemptus mundi) - at most, it becomes an object of disintegrative and disenchanting investigations. Perhaps in a later order of things, when the ideal of withdrawal moves to the second row, it will be 'rediscovered' as the target area for care, mission and spiritual conquest. The decisive aspect is that the increas ing insignificance of the exterior following from the secessionary distinction releases an incredible surplus of self-referentiality in the individual. Channelling this surplus into occupational programmes is the purpose of existence in ethical separation. Indeed: once the outside world has been separated from me and has become distant, I find myself alone and discover myself as a never-ending task."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon Nov 04, 2013 11:54 am

Sloterdijk wrote:: "What I am discussing here using the category of secession is thus founded on an inner act that, for want of a better term, I shall call 'recession'. This first of all means the withdrawal of each person from the mode of being that is immersed in the riverbed of worldly matters - or, to take up the oft-invoked image once again, an exit from the river of life to take up a position on the shore. Only the recessive self-insulation can give rise to the behavioural complex that Foucault, following on from the Stoic principle of cura sui, calls 'concern for oneself' (souci de soil. This can only develop if the object of concern, the self, has already stepped out of the situational river of social life and established itself as a region sui generis. Where retreat to the self is carried out - whether the practising person burns the bridges behind them, as monks of every kind usually do, or settles into the everyday back-and-forth between self-pole and world-pole, as char acterizes the sages of the Stoic type - it reinforces the emergence of an enclave in the existent which, remaining within the metaphor, I shall call 'shore subjectivity'.

For millennia, this subjectivity has been fighting from its precarious position on the shore of the alienated river for a language that is suited to its confusing self-experience. Its attempts at articulation fluctuate between extremes: spiritual-heroic overcompensation on the one side, where the foreignness of the outside world is meant to be conquered through an alliance between the inner and the divine - as demonstrated by Heraclitus in his triumphant moments and by Indian thinkers during the Upanishad period - and the flight to contrition on the other side, as if the imp()ssibility of staying in the river of life could only be explained by a profound personal guilt; that is the path first trodden by early Judaism before Christianity expanded it into an avenue."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Monist Metaphysics Mon Nov 04, 2013 11:57 am

The Athletic-Ascetic is maximal Thymos personified.

Like Buddha said while defining Nirvana in its proper definition;

"What have I to do with this "order" of the world?!"

Tat-agatha is one who has gone over to the other shore from the erotic mundane.

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

» Project #1 Free Will
» Aristotle - Metaphysics.
» Satyr's Metaphysics